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Taking Heat for Not Cooking

ONE morning earlier this month, Rocco DiSpirito climbed into a car that would take him from downtown Manhattan out to Jamaica, Queens, where he grew up. He hadn’t been back to Jamaica in 20 years or so, and he was looking forward to the 13-mile journey with a mix of curiosity and trepidation.

“I mean, I remember being afraid constantly — afraid for my life,” Mr. DiSpirito said of his childhood in the 1970s. “I was the kid in the maroon blazer on the way to Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic school, in between one gang and another gang, and it was like, How did I want to get beat up today?”

For those who know Mr. DiSpirito only as the brown-eyed, wavy-haired Bertolli spokesman and cookbook author who’s become a smiling regular on reality shows like “Top Chef,” “The Biggest Loser,” “Dancing With the Stars” and his new cooking program on A&E, “Rocco Gets Real,” the notion of a rough upbringing — part Bloods-and-Crips, part “Bicycle Thief” — might come as a surprise. But Mr. DiSpirito seemed genuinely anxious about returning to the neighborhood where he says he was beaten up on a regular basis.

“Punched in the face. Mugged. Robbed. Knives. Guns. The whole thing,” he said. “I used to accuse my parents of not loving me for making us stay here.” After roaming the neighborhood for an hour or so, he took a last look around before hopping back into the car. “In a way,” he said, “cooking kind of saved me from all this.”

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THE OVEN-FREE LIFE Rocco DiSpirito, left, at the store in Queens where he was once a bag boy.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Except that it didn’t — not, at least, if you’re talking about the getting-beaten-up-on-a-regular-basis part. In a way Mr. DiSpirito is still that kid in the maroon blazer, only now the roving gangs hitting him up for his milk money are culinary.

For the knife-sharpening snark squadrons of Gawker.com and a segment of the gastronomic elite, he has come to embody the Faustian bargain of celebrity in the restaurant business. He is portrayed, and often satirized, as a supernaturally talented chef who squandered his gifts in the scattershot pursuit of fame, fortune and pink ruffled shirts.

“He’s almost gotten to the point where people in the food world feel sorry for him and want him back,” said Michael Ruhlman, a cookbook author who has written for The New York Times. “He’s this really brilliant guy, foodwise, who’s forsaken everything that he’s good at for something that he’s not good at. And that makes me really sad.”

Last year, Mr. Ruhlman and Anthony Bourdain (no stranger to the concept of aggressive brand extension) announced on Mr. Ruhlman’s blog that they would hand out Golden Clog Awards to the celebrity chefs whom they considered the best and the worst exemplars of that strange breed. Among the dubious honors was the Rocco Award, saluting the “worst career move by a talented chef.”

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BACK HOME Rocco DiSpirito in Jamaica, Queens.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

(To his credit, Mr. DiSpirito gamely showed up at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival and handed out the award in person, even though Mr. Bourdain had “mercilessly and enthusiastically made sport of Rocco DiSpirito many, many times,” as Mr. Bourdain himself put it in a blog entry.)

The word “sad” seems to surface a lot when you bring up Mr. DiSpirito’s curious career arc. “We were talking the other day, another food-obsessed person and I, and we were just saying how sad it was that he has disappeared,” said Gael Greene, the grande dame of New York food scribes, and one of the first to celebrate Mr. DiSpirito’s talent 13 years ago when he was the chef at Dava. “I do believe that ‘Dancing With the Stars’ is kind of the last stop. This person said, ‘Oh, he’ll never be back, if he can make a living doing commercials and appearances and TV and books.’ I don’t understand — has he totally lost that passion to cook? Because there are chefs that don’t like to cook, and they just want to be stars. How could somebody be so talented and so gifted and just write it off?”

Of course, these days plenty of chefs are hawking products and hustling for TV gigs — Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, Tom Colicchio, Mr. Bourdain himself — and yet very few of them come in for the vigorous hazings that Mr. DiSpirito endures.

That, Ms. Greene explained, is because Mr. DiSpirito no longer oversees a kitchen. “Mario still is doing restaurants, and his restaurants are mostly wonderful, if you see him there or not,” she said. “Anthony Bourdain was so funny and so amusing that he became a show-business personality, and we don’t question that, because he was not a great chef who sold out. He was just a perfectly ordinary cook. But somebody like Rocco, who is exceptionally gifted, seems to have thrown it all away — that’s why people are so upset about it.”

As the trip to Queens made clear, Mr. DiSpirito has had a freakish, prodigy-like understanding of food from the very start. The rich ethnic mélange of Jamaica, he said, is where he picked up the culinary cross-pollination that would later propel him to stardom as a chef. “I don’t think there is more cultural diversity than in Queens,” he said. “I think in many ways my worldview on flavor was formed here.”

As soon as the car pulled up in front of a two-story red-and-white house at 148-01 90th Avenue, where five members of the DiSpirito family and several boarders lived before the DiSpiritos moved to a safer neighborhood in the early 1980s, he became swept up in a rush of Proustian triggers. As he dashed around the neighborhood, his memories of its past squalor (“There was an apartment in every building that sold drugs ... My friend Eddie lived right here, he OD’d on heroin”) were crosshatched, over and over, with memories of food.

He pointed to a spot on Jamaica Avenue where he’d tasted his first pomegranate. He tracked down the tiny patch of dirt on 150th where an elderly Italian woman named Vita once grew squash and tomatoes. He made note of the McDonald’s that his father, Raffaele, used to forbid him to set foot in.

“Key Food,” he said as he approached a supermarket. “I used to bag groceries here.” This dislodged yet another memory — of how the young Rocco would pocket a few coins from his grocery job and dart down the street to buy two jumbo shrimp that his mother, Nicolina, could boil for him back home.

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He had a tight grip on Karina Smirnoff on Dancing With the StarsCredit
Kelsey McNeal/ABC

He was 11 when he got a job at a pizzeria on Sutphin Boulevard; there he became obsessed with perfectly calibrating the balance between the ice and the bubbles in a fountain soda. Tim Ryan, who was one of Mr. DiSpirito’s instructors at the Culinary Institute of America, and is now the president of the school, said that his star student could leave a distinctive imprint even on raw onions. “You could tell when he diced vegetables versus somebody else,” Dr. Ryan said. “You could pick his out of a group.”

To understand why Mr. DiSpirito is perceived as a wayward son of American cuisine, it makes sense to go back to his triumph in 1997, when his Union Pacific opened on East 22nd Street. (It closed in 2004.) People who fell under the spell of his cooking then still compare Mr. DiSpirito to an upstart Thomas Keller, and they slip into a reverie when they summon up their first encounter with his tiny but epically flavorful appetizer of raw scallops.

New York magazine rhapsodized over that dish and others this way: “Sweet, small scallops nuzzled in their shells by blobs of sea urchin with an essence of tomato, mustard oil, mirin and black mustard. Halibut braised in goose fat with ginger jus and shallot cracklings. Mango and papaya carpaccio with pineapple sherbet and candied cilantro. Do these sound like the delusions of a madman? In less capable hands, maybe; in DiSpirito’s, it’s pure genius.”

While it’s hard to grasp why a genius would feel compelled to mambo alongside hip-swiveling punch lines like Lance Bass and Kim Kardashian, it can be equally surprising to hear that in his Union Pacific heyday, Mr. DiSpirito was thought of as too much of a taste-tinkering recluse.

“The funny thing is that at that time, my partners and everyone in my world at the restaurant were always telling me I’m too serious,” Mr. DiSpirito said. “This is what is so mind-blowing to me. I was always too serious and too pure and didn’t see the bigger picture enough and didn’t understand that cooking and the restaurant business were entertainment. I needed to take it easy and do food that was simpler and made people happy.”

He was urged, he said, to put fail-safe customer bait on the menu — dishes like steak and tuna tartare. He cooked short ribs, yes, but even those brought out the obsessive in him. “So I proceed to concoct the short ribs with the most ingredients ever known to man. The short-rib braise itself had 20 or 30 ingredients in it.”

If there was a specific moment when the sun began to singe Mr. DiSpirito’s wax wings, that would have to be 2003, when he made his reality-TV debut in “The Restaurant,” NBC’s video vérité chronicle of the flirtations and stove fires in a Manhattan meatballerie called Rocco’s. For viewers, and for the show’s producers, things went swimmingly, which is to say they went really badly for the head chef at Rocco’s. A perpetual skirmish between Mr. DiSpirito and Jeffrey Chodorow, the entrepreneur who was funding the place, escalated into a flurry of litigation, with Mr. Chodorow suing Mr. DiSpirito and Mr. DiSpirito countersuing Mr. Chodorow and Mr. DiSpirito eventually being barred from entering the premises of a restaurant bearing his name — while his own mother was still stirring pots in the kitchen.

He went on: “I think I took a lot for granted. I think when someone puts seven or eight million dollars into a restaurant with your name on it, it’s a pretty big deal. You can’t just think, ‘Well, that’s what he’s supposed to do!’ I think I underappreciated a lot of what was happening to me.”

Dr. Ryan met with his former student during that dark phase and offered advice. “I said, ‘Rocco, dust yourself off and get back into the restaurant business,’ ” he recalled. “At that time he still had Union Pacific. I said: ‘That’s a jewel. Throw yourself into it and that’s what people will focus on.’ And for whatever reason, he just didn’t want to do that. This is my interpretation — he had lost the fire for that, and had bigger dreams and aspirations.”

Asked about Mr. DiSpirito’s game plan, Dr. Ryan said: “It involves more exposure to the general public. That’s where Rocco’s thinking bigger: ‘How can I pursue my passion for food and convey my knowledge and my expertise in a way that doesn’t just reach a couple hundred people a night, but thousands of people, millions of people a night?’ ”

Indeed, “The Restaurant” marked a shift in Mr. DiSpirito’s public identity. Within a few years, the meticulous wunderkind from Queens had turned into a food-show Zelig. These days he has his A&E show and a new cookbook, also called “Rocco Gets Real,” a name that seems as much a mission statement as a title — an attempt, perhaps, to merge the public and private and past and present Roccos and get back to basics. In contrast to his near-psychedelic experiments with flavor at Union Pacific, the “Rocco Gets Real” book (Meredith, $19.95) features recipes that often hinge on brand-name ingredients like a can of Progresso lentil soup, a jar of Heinz pork gravy or a cup of Splenda.

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With Jay Leno in 2004.Credit
Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Mr. DiSpirito defends his career path with missionary zeal. What he loves to do, he says, is to bring his rarefied culinary skills to regular folks everywhere: “The vast majority of what I hear from the people who appreciate what I do — which is I think more of the general public, more of America, versus the people who write and read Gawker, a small but very influential group of people — is that they love what I do, and they feel like there is someone from the professional world advocating for them,” he said.

Mr. DiSpirito, by the way, hasn’t ruled out opening a restaurant someday. “If Keith McNally came to me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got the perfect situation for you,’ who knows?” he said. (In an e-mail message, Mr. McNally called the suggestion “hugely flattering” but said he would “rather stay away from commenting” on the idea.) “I would certainly entertain opportunities — and I have,” Mr. DiSpirito said. “I just don’t think the right situation has come up yet.”

Still, does the disappointment of the elite gastronomes grate on him? “I try not to judge them for how they feel,” he said. “If I make a judgment about it, then it will lead to anger and resentment, and I don’t want to really go there.” The answer carried a distinct echo of therapy.

“Well,” he said, “there’s been lots of therapy.”

One had to wonder what a therapist would make of a birthday dinner that Mr. DiSpirito recently cooked for 13 friends in Los Angeles. It took place on Nov. 20 at the home of Ben Silverman, who is a co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and the man who produced “The Restaurant.”

Mr. DiSpirito whipped up several courses, many of which dated back to his glory days at Union Pacific. He kicked off the meal with that famous raw scallop surrounded by sea urchin and mustard oil. He may no longer run a restaurant, he said, but “I can still cook like that.” The dinner was served in honor of Mr. DiSpirito himself. He had turned 42 the day before.